


Found You

by Lumielles



Category: Star Wars Legends: The Old Republic
Genre: Brother-Sister Relationships, Death, Family Angst, Gen, Sibling Death, Ziost, lightsided Inquisitor, not romantic - Freeform, posession
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-23
Updated: 2018-02-23
Packaged: 2019-03-22 19:51:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,970
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13771323
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lumielles/pseuds/Lumielles
Summary: Aramys finds her brother on Ziost amidst other evacuees.  But Vitiate finds them before she can get him to safety.





	Found You

**Author's Note:**

> Just for reference, Brevom is Aramys' older maternal half-brother, but he was raised alongside her by Aramys' father, Idan.

Aramys looked around the small city square.  Several evacuees pushed past her, desperate to get to the nearby transport taking groups to the orbital station.  This wasn’t far from the building she grew up in, she recognized the statue of an ancient Sith Lord and the usual coating of frost that clung to its bronze shell.  The People’s Tower was only several blocks away, a ten-minute walk at most. 

            Being back here, walking the streets when they were this deserted, was like walking through fleeting specters of her childhood.  If she focused enough, she could almost feel the presence of her father beside her as they made their way to the marketplace.  She let out a breath she hadn’t intended to hold, forming a cloud of vapor that whirled in the air before her.  It hadn’t been enough to find her mother in the same place she’d been betrayed by her, she had to be haunted by the ghosts of an entire city.

            “What building are we looking for?” Ashara asked.  Her Master walked surprisingly fast for someone her size, likely from having to keep up with those taller than her. 

            “People’s Tower, I always thought it was ugly, but--” Aramys said, coming to a sudden halt.

            “But?” Ashara said, following her Master’s gaze to a tall man across the square standing with a small group of people.  His back was turned to them, but his blond hair was a shock against the dark aesthetic of the surrounding buildings.  Aramys took off, running at the man with all she had.  Ashara’s hand went to her saber, expecting her Master to attack.

            “Brevom!” Aramys called out as she ran.  The pounding of her boots against the duracrete matched the pounding of her heart as she rushed toward her older brother.  He hadn’t seen him since she was eleven years old and he was fifteen, but his presence in the force was unmistakable. 

            The man turned, eyes wide as he spotted her.  He extended his arms, catching her as she jumped into him, throwing her arms around his shoulders.  The siblings spun, compensating for Aramys’ momentum.

            “You’re alive!  Stars, Aramys!” Brevom laughing, lowering his baby sister back to her feet.  He held her face, grinning ear to ear as he exhaled in disbelief.  “Look at you—“

            “Look at _you_ ,” Aramys began to laugh as well, the urgency of her mission to the People’s Tower now the farthest thing from her mind.  She reached up and touched her brother’s short beard.  She recalled once catching him examining his disappointing lack of facial hair in a mirror, her father assuring him he’d grow some eventually.  There was rarely an opportunity she hadn’t teased him about it that year.  Clearly, Idan had been right.

            “What are you doing here?” Brevom asked, his face falling as he remembered the evacuation. 

            “I’m… assisting Minister Beniko,” Aramys said.  Better to keep things short for the sake of time.  What she said was true, after all.  “Why haven’t you evacuated?”

            “We’re trying,” Brevom sighed, turning to the group behind him. A group of slaves wearing near identical clothes to his.  Aramys’ eyes drifted to her brother’s neck, where a shiny collar sat.  She felt the familiar ache of the collar she once wore at the back of her neck.  It took everything she had not to rub the scars there.

            “I have a ship on the orbital station, Mother is already on her way there—“ Aramys said.

            “Mother?” Brevom looked back at her, bewildered.  “Our mother?”

            “A story for another time,” Aramys said, her voice low.  “I can escort you to the transport—“

            “That one isn’t taking slaves, we’re trying to find another.” Brevom cut her off, shaking his head.

            “They will if I tell them to,” Aramys said, a knowing grin pulled at the corner of her mouth.

            “I suppose that’s also a story for another time?” Brevom asked with a chuckle. 

            “You have a lot to catch up on,” Aramys nodded, beginning their walk back toward the transport.

            “Don’t you think these people can get there on their own?” Ashara asked, keeping pace beside her.  “Time isn’t exactly something we have a lot of right now.”

            Aramys slowed, knowing full well that her apprentice was right.  Brevom had made it this far with the others on their own.  She could just as easily comm the transport and order them to give her brother and the others a safe way off planet.  Lana was waiting for her arrival, after all.

            “Brev, I—“ Aramys said, turning back to her brother after coming to a stop.  She felt the air get sucked out of her lungs, the haunted feeling she felt minutes before, made sense.  It wasn’t her childhood that had been following her through the nearly abandoned streets of New Adasta.  It had been Vitiate.  She saw him now in Brevom’s eyes, the soulless milky gray that she had seen in Master Suro had covered up the light blue that should have been looking back at her.  A shockwave spread through her body, making her limbs feel numb and hollowed out as it spread to her fingers and toes.  If she did so much as blink, her skeleton would shatter, having turned to brittle glass.

            He was possessed by the Emperor, as were the several slaves who followed them.  As the ones behind him rushed Ashara, who jumped several feet back in response to the attack, Brevom stood completely still; now unrecognizable with the malicious dark grin that seemed to twist him from this very core.  With thousands of things and nothing strangling her thoughts, she didn’t see his hands reach up and grab her neck.

            Panic gripped her as she struggled for breath against his grip.  She scratched at his hands, her nails scraping the thin skin on his knuckles.  All she had been taught, the years she’d spent being kicked around at the Academy, the antagonists she had brought to their knees—It was nothing compared to this.  She could never have prepared herself for this.  With each desperate attempt she made to free herself, Vitiate tightened Brevom’s fingers around her thin neck.

            She pushed at him with the force, but her lack of air made it hard to concentrate enough to make it listen to her.  Her wrist went limp as she tried a third time, the racing heartbeat in her ears slowing as the city above her began to spin.  The blue whirl of Ashara’s lightsaber cut into a possessed slave to her right.

            Blackness seeped into the corners of her vision as she used with little energy she had left to fumble for the dualsaber clipped to her belt.  If she could just clip him with it, in the leg or arm, perhaps the pain would make him let go.

            As if he had read her thoughts, Vitiate removed Brevom’s hands from her neck, snatching the dualsaber from her limp fingers as she collapsed to the ground.  Coughing in between breaths, she forced herself to stand.  Electricity tingled the tips of her fingers, a habitual response when she found herself faced with any kind of adversary.  Unlike those previous times, she had no desire to blast lightning at the man before her.

            Vitiate didn’t speak, knowing that his silence was torture enough for her.  Instead, he brought the dualsaber up to Brevom’s chest, pointing one end of it directly over his heart. 

            Aramys’ blood became as frigid as the wind around her as pushed out with the force, hoping that knocking him off his feet would stop him from igniting her weapon through her brother’s heart.  She watched in horror as the blade barely missed her brother’s chest as she threw him several feet backward.  The saber clattered against the frozen ground just as the back of Brevom’s head hit the duracrete with a hideous crack that echoed in her ears.

            Staggering to her brother’s side, Aramys collapsed to her knees, lifting his head.  Her hand found the puddle of blood that had pooled there, soaking his hair and covering her hand.  She lifted her hand, looking at it as she felt more blood soak into her dress as Brevom’s head rested in her lap.

            He started laughing, his eyes fluttering open to stare up at her.  It was Vitiate using her brother’s last few moments to mock her.  It was maniacal and sadistic, an ugly dark parody of the person Brevom was. 

            “No, come on Brev,” she whispered, cradling his head as the laughter began to die.  If she hadn’t have pushed him back—No.  Vitiate would have killed him either way.  But that didn’t make this any easier to understand.  She felt blood leak through the fingers she held at the back of his head.

            “I’m sorry, please come back,” Aramys brought her head to his, eyes shut tight against a flood of tears.  “I just found you, please.”

            His death made the galaxy go dark.  Thousands of needles ripping through her at lightspeed, tearing her apart millimeter by millimeter, atom by atom.  The gray in his eyes faded to a lifeless blue as Vitiate left him to suffer through his few final seconds. It all flashed before her now.  How cruel those memories were to resurface now after years of dormancy.

            “Brevom please,” she begged, bringing a blood-soaked hand to his face.  Smudging crimson on his cheek and jaw, staining the hair she combed her fingers through to get it out of his eyes.  He wasn’t even looking at her, but up at the craggy cavern ceiling that had hung over them for most of their lives.  The cage he never got to be free of.

            The scream that came from her throat was agonized, ripping through the square.  The street lights shook with the shockwave of power that she released through the force.  Everything stood on end, and the last slave that Ashara was fighting was thrown against a nearby building.  For the first time in her life, Aramys felt the dark side creep at the edges of her soul.  The hatred and fear she felt were intoxicating, leaving her numb and hypersensitive all at once.  There was nothing she wanted more in the galaxy than to see Vitiate kneel before her, begging for mercy she would never give.  He and his Empire had taken nearly everything from her.  Her father, her brother, their freedom, her freedom.

            She may have no longer be required to wear a collar, but she was still indentured to the very power that had oppressed her family for generations.  A long line of slaves, all punished for the actions of an ancestor the galaxy no longer remembered. Her brother had been nothing but an easy target for the thing that wanted nothing more than the torment her.  Brevom died because of her, no matter how she chose to look at it.

            In a subconscious attempt soothe herself, she began to rock back and forth, cradling Brevom against her.

            She took ragged breathes through her hysterical cries.  Ashara was nothing more than a blur as she ran toward her.  Her throat stung, the freezing air irritating the newly raw flesh. Putting a hand on her brother’s face, she felt skin that had already gone cold.

            In shock, she dropped him, scrambling away from his body.  The sight of him, and the pool of blood she’d been kneeling in ,caused her to vomit what little was in her stomach.  She struggled to breathe, hyperventilating between each empty gag.

            “Master, we need to get moving,” Ashara said, kneeling in front of her.  As sob stuck to the back of Aramys’ throat as she looked up at her apprentice, her friend.  “We can’t stay here, he’ll find us again.”

            Aramys only nodded as Ashara helped her to her feet. 

           


End file.
